English Journal Listings

What is peer-review?

A lot of times, academic journals require peer review for new articles.
What this means is that when an article is submitted to a journal, it
has to go through a process where other experts in the same field read
it and decide whether or not it's a good article. That decision depends
on questions like:

Is it well-researched?

Are the methods consistently
applied?

Are the basic principles of the article accurate according to
the reviewer's knowledge of the subject?

Is the article as neutral as
possible, or does the author seem to personally prefer one conclusion
over another?

This is important because it's a quality-control
process, which means only good, strong articles that are accurate,
well-researched, and consistent are published. Because of that, you can
trust those articles because you know the author didn't just make up a
bunch of big words that sound nice together. Peer-reviewed articles can
also be called scholarly articles because they're very high-quality
works that are appropriate for use by scholars (like you!) in their
academic research.

You can find peer-reviewed articles in most
of our e-journal databases. When you search for articles, you will
usually see a little box under the search box that says something like
"Scholarly journals, including peer-reviewed" in ProQuest Research
Library or "Scholarly (Peer-Reviewed) Journals" in Ebscohost: Academic
Search Premier; the database will let you put a little check mark in
that box so that only high-quality articles appear in your search
results. You may need to hunt around for that little box if you're not
familiar with the database you're using, but it's always worth the
effort!